Born in 1869 – Henri Matisse, French painter and sculptor.

Above: Matisse a few months before his death.

Today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents.

From the Gospel of Matthew: “When Herod saw that he had been fooled by the wise men he was furiously angry. He issued orders, and killed all the male children of two years and under in Bethlehem and the surrounding district—basing his calculation on his careful questioning of the wise men.”

Above: Massacre of the Innocents by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1567)

On this day in 1929, Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin ordered the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”.

The word kulak originally referred to independent farmers in the Russian Empire who emerged from the peasantry and became wealthy following the Stolypin reform, which began in 1906. The label of kulak was broadened in 1918 to include any peasant who resisted handing over their grain to detachments from Moscow. During 1929–1933, Stalin’s leadership of the total campaign to collectivize the peasantry meant that “peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres more than their neighbors” were labeled “kulaks”.

Born in 1930 – Jean-Luc Godard, French-Swiss filmmaker.

“ I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That’s what all my movies are about.“

Born in 1904 – Clyfford Still, American painter and educator.

Above: Untitled, 1950

Born in 1918 – Corita Kent, American nun, illustrator, and educator.

“RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.”

-from Sister Corita’s “10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life”

Today: Zimbabwe’s military seized government control, targeting “criminals” around the President Robert Mugabe.

Above: Major General Sibusiso Moyo, Chief of Staff Logistics addresses the nation. 

“We wish to make it abundantly clear that this is not a military takeover. We are only targeting criminals around him who are committing crimes that are causing social and economic suffering in the country….As soon as we have accomplished our mission, we expect that the situation will return to normalcy.”

Born in 354 – Augustine of Hippo, Roman bishop and theologian.

“Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.”

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Born in 1922 – Kurt Vonnegut, American soldier and author.

“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.”

                                                       –from Breakfast of Champions

Born in 1861 – James Naismith, Canadian-American physician and educator, inventor of basketball.

Above: Naismith, and wife Maude.